as equal on each side. With Jekyll, it
was a thing of vital instinct. He had now seen the full deformity
of that creature that shared with him some of the phenomena of
consciousness, and was co-heir with him to death: and beyond these links
of community, which in themselves made the most poignant part of
his distress, he thought of Hyde, for all his energy of life, as of
something not only hellish but inorganic. This was the shocking thing;
that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices; that the
amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was dead, and had
no shape, should usurp the offices of life. And this again, that that
insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye;
lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle
to be born; and at every hour of weakness, and in the confidence of
slumber, prevailed against him, and deposed him out of life. The hatred
of Hyde for Jekyll was of a different order. His terror of the gallows
drove him continually to commit temporary suicide, and return to his
subordinate station of a part instead of a person; but he loathed the
necessity, he loathed the despondency into which Jekyll was now fallen,
and he resented the dislike with which he was himself regarded. Hence
the ape-like tricks that he would play me, scrawling in my own hand
blasphemies on the pages of my books, burning the letters and destroying
the portrait of my father; and indeed, had it not been for his fear of
death, he would long ago have ruined himself in order to involve me in
the ruin. But his love of me is wonderful; I go further: I, who sicken
and freeze at the mere thought of him, when I recall the abjection and
passion of this attachment, and when I know how he fears my power to cut
him off by suicide, I find it in my heart to pity him.

It is useless, and the time awfully fails me, to prolong this
description; no one has ever suffered such torments, let that suffice;
and yet even to these, habit brought--no, not alleviation--but a
certain callousness of soul, a certain acquiescence of despair; and my
punishment might have gone on for years, but for the last calamity which
has now fallen, and which has finally severed me from my own face and
nature. My provision of the salt, which had never been renewed since the
date of the first experiment, began to run low. I sent out for a fresh
supply and mixed the draught; the ebullition followed, and the firs